Bits of Travel at Home (1878) by Helen Hunt Jackson

A GLIMPSE OF COUNTRY WINTER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

It
is worth staying or coming to see. There is nothing
like it in cities; it should not have name in
common with that black, blustering, dripping-from-eaves,
knee-deep-in-slosh misery, which is all that New
York or Boston associates with the word “winter.”

It began a month ago, as gently and cautiously as if
Nature were trying experiment, and did not know how
the earth could bear it: first, snow on the distant
mountains, to show us of what color it would be; glistening
white like crystal, at noon; solid white like white
rock, if the day grew cloudy; and deep pink at sunset,
like pink topaz, or conch-shell pearls, or cinnamon
roses; our eyes could not grow wonted to the splendor.
Then came fine soft showers, a few moments long, sifting
lustreless silver on every grass-blade and tree-twig;
in an hour or two no trace was left, on the fields or by
the roadside; but going into the woods, one found
fringes and patches of it on fallen logs, in hollows, and
laps of mosses. It is sad to think how few people have
heart (or chance) to go into the woods after early snows
begin. The hush of them is sweeter than their sound
in summer; there are just as many colors, and all new;
and as for shape, the first light outlining of snow is
an almost miraculous revelation of infinitesimal points,
curves, peaks, jags, wreathings, and intertwinings of all
things that grow. There is not a dark corner from
beginning to end of the wood; there is not a single unillumined
moss stem; no, not one, in great spaces where
moss and Linnaea, and partridge-berry vines are so
inextricably tangled, that lifting up any all the rest
come with it, in mats two feet wide; no man could
count the fallen beech and maple leaves in even so little
room of ground as he might in five minutes tread full of
steps; but every one of the leaves holds its own diamond
drop of water, or carven crystal of snow: they
are curled into millions of shapes; an artist might come
and draw from them alone, until next year interrupted
him. “O, what is that?” said my friend yesterday, as
I held up to her a scrolled cornucopia of amber brown,
with a twisted stem two inches long. It looked like a
fantastic goblet, cut out of something finer than wood,
more shining than glass, and dyed as silk can be dyed.
Over and round the rim, there stayed, solid and still,
what might have been frozen foam of the last toast
drank. It was only a huge beech leaf; it had rolled
itself up as it fell, and poised in a cleft of its own tree’s
root, so as to catch in open mouth all the snow it could
hold.

The hardier ferns are as green as in summer; all the
mosses are greener; and the lichens are but just beginning
to show what scarlets and yellows they mix; and
low-lying leaves, cornels, tiarellas, and a myriad more,
are tinted wondrously with claret and purple and pink;
gay, almost, as were the maple and ash leaves which
made the upper air so brilliant a month ago. Only the
firs and spruces seem unchanged; perhaps their dark
glossiness is a little deepened; but they do not take
much note of these sprinkling snows; they bide their
time of beauty, which will be the first hour of storm;
then, moment by moment, they will be transformed into
a dazzling Gothic architecture, the like of which is not
to be found on the earth, unless perchance there may
be arctic cathedrals built of ice in open polar fields,
where no men go to worship.

The light snows gently went and came, until we grew
aware of their promise and impatient of their delay.
Had it been her first snowing, Nature could not better
have won us to be ready for her spectacle. She was
honest too; for there were days of sleet; the windows
froze down, and the roads were icy and horrible.

In these days a bustle of preparation was to be heard
and seen in the village. Men who had for weeks spent
most of their time in a miserable sort of waking trance,
on tilted chairs around the stove of the village “store,”
were to be seen hard at work “banking up” their
houses. The heaping and boarding of these flowerless
flower-beds of earth around the lower stories of country
houses is sensible, perhaps, but not artistic. The German
peasantry keep out cold by a more picturesque
method, piling their fire-wood compactly round and
round their houses, leaving small loopholes at windows,
till, finally, the whole structure is a combination of
castle and log-cabin, by no means ugly to see.

In the days too, potatoes, if accurately quoted, in
market phrase, might have been said to be “lively;”
for they were being shovelled and tumbled by bushels
into cellar windows all along the street.
The blacksmith’s anvil had no rest from morning till
late at night. His great red fire glared out like an
angry watchful eye long after dark; much I fear the
poor country horses fared ill in his numb and weary
hands.

Builders’ hammers, too, rang out more vigorously
than ever. There are eleven new houses going up in
this little town. Next summer’s hospitality will have
open doors enough, and nobody will turn away, as
scores have done this year, for want of room.

In these days also came Elder MacNaughton the
Baptist, crying “Prepare ye the way of the Lord;”
and the Baptists prepared it after a bitter fashion;
laying violent hands on a little meadow brook, and
damming it up, till it made of itself a muddy pool, some
six feet square. Down to this pool, on a Sunday noon,
came six young women, one with her lover, to be baptized
in the icy water; also there was that sacred
being,” as good George MacDonald says, “a maid-child.”
The village people came in silent, solemn
groups to look on; some standing closely in rows
along the edge of the stream, others sitting and standing
a few rods off on top of the high sloping bank. We
felt almost as if we had come upon some gathering of
old Covenanters, under the gray sky of a Scottish winter;
the bare frozen fields, the black fir woods, the
circling mountains, the rough rocks, the uncovered
heads and awed faces, the low minor cadences of the
psalm, and more than all the unutterable silences in
intervals of the service,—all made up a scene which
we shall not forget, and which will make that little
meadow brook sing less merrily in our ears for many a
summer to come.

But the days went on; and we being strangers in the
land, having neither houses to build or bank, nor horses
to be rough-shod, nor faith in Elder MacNaughton’s
preaching, grew almost weary of waiting for sight of
grand, full winter.

Already the far-away Green Mountains were white,
and their distant slopes seemed to lift and lie level along
the horizon, as one could fancy icefields lying white and
high among blue icebergs. Mounts Washington, Jefferson,
and Adams were a snowy wall to the east; and
glistening in the sun to the south lay the Franconias,
gentle and gracious still under all their snows, as in
summer’s green; every thing far and near, great and
small, was silvered, or tufted, or mounded with snow.
But not one smallest outline was lost or altered; we
could still see on Strawberry Hill the maple branch on
which the yellow-hammers had their nest; each seed-plume
of golden-rods which we had spared in the lanes
stood upright, and only more beautiful for being frosted
over; stone walls and fences stretched out plainer than
ever, being braided of black and white; and wheels
still rattled in frozen ruts half filled and barely hid by
snow. This was not winter. We waited for more.

At last it came, as I almost think it loves best to
come, in the night; soft, complete, shining; small trace
now of any man’s landmark, by wall or fence; no color
but white and no shape but snow, to any shrub or tree
or wood; looking out, we perceived that no man could
any more tell us of Labrador, or Greenland: they cannot
be more than the whole of winter; the whole of
winter lay between the horizon and our doorstep. For
a little there was not even road; if we had had our way,
no human being should have taken step to make footprint
between that sunrise and sunset; nor should there
have been sound, save the slide of drifts from pine
boughs in the forest, and the whir of little snow-birds’
wings. But we discovered that it is not possible to
look out on such a night’s snow so early that it shall
not be found printed here and there with the tiny star-shaped
impress of feet so light that they barely jarred
the crystals; also that the loud shouts of merry boys
are no more discordant in such morning’s air than the
gentle noises snow-birds make when they fly.

In a few hours the village surveying and road-making
were over, and work began and went on. Since then
there has been no surprise, no change; except that
every day the mountains have some tint of purple, or
blue, or gray, or red, which they have not had before,
and the great dome of sky looks higher and higher.
After living for months on such a plateau as this, from
which half the sky there is can be seen at once, it will
seem like groping blindfolded to walk about city streets
and see sky only by strips, through chinks; or more,
perhaps, as if the great celestial umbrella had been
suddenly shut down on our heads, and we were darkly
fumbling among the wires and bones.

Each day as we walk up and down the soft roads,
scattering the feathery flakes with our feet, craunching
a few now and then, or rolling them up into balls and
tossing them aimlessly, the good people of the village
stare at us with mingled amazement and pity. We
know they look upon us compassionately, thinking in
their secret hearts that we must be banished by some
sin or misfortune into this wintry exile. But we smile
as we pass them, and say under our breath, “Yes, pity
us; we are glad of your pity; we need it; for we must
go away next week!”